Best of 2012: Pop culture changed by Big Bird

Honey Boo Boo, Shades of Grey among other highlights

Big Bird, of the children’s television show Sesame Street: Mitt Romney’s threat to the beloved character may have changed the course of the U.S. presidential election.

Photograph by: Matt Sayles
, Postmedia News

EDMONTON - Don’t mess with Big Bird.

The year 2012’s most monolithic pop culture event was neither Fifty Shades of Grey’s hyper-safe mommy porn, nor was it George Lucas’s $4-billion Darth-Disney sale of Star Wars from one empire to another.

Yes, the Mayan calendar let us down while we fetishized the odd beauty of Honey Boo Boo, and that was huge. Foam sprayed mirthfully as Gangnam Style knew no earthly bounds, in a video watched by billions. Yet even outward-exploding Instagram, along with all those bottomless zombies, have to take a back seat to that insanely happy, yellow Bird.

Because, thing is, it can be seriously argued that the historical course of Earth’s most powerful nation — the source of the majority of what we’re surveying today — slammed left the moment Mitt Romney promised, while smiling, to cut off Big Bird’s oxygen supply. Big Bird? You actually threatened Big Bird during a presidential debate? It’s like Romney hired Daryl Katz’s people to do his PR. (Katz is involved with this thing called NHL hockey that used to actually happen — you might not remember it.)

As countless D.I.Y. BB buttons flooded American streets, zombie Jim Henson must have backflipped in his grave.

Speaking of such, remember when everyone called a 19th-century, 2-D reflection a “hologram” as Tupac’s “ghost” played at the Coachella music festival? Not to be outdone, Jay-Z brought a similar projection of Notorious B.I.G. to a show.

Presumably two unrelated things, hardcore metal legend Al Jourgensen collapsed onstage during a Ministry concert as boy bands like One Direction proved not so much that we have no taste, but indeed a taste for everything, no matter how many times we’ve already consumed it. Like zombies!

One might detect a segue here: Besides his world tour, which blew Edmontonians away twice in November, the impossible lineup of the 121212 Hurricane Sandy Relief Benefit concert included Paul McCartney fronting the reunited living members of Nirvana. The circle of Helter Skelter, complete. That benefit lineup also included … well, it’d be easier to list the legendary bands NOT onstage. The Doors, I guess? Thankfully no zombie “hologram” of Kurt Cobain.

Notably — and the local record stores certainly will agree — the resurgence of vinyl transcended hipster status, the Beatles remasters on LP being the biggest release, by weight, at over 21 pounds.

Meanwhile, among the living, spaceship Skrillex dominated, while his lovely tour-mate Grimes topped the Pitchfork charts (trivia: people still read Rolling Stone to discover what records to “buy.” OK, “steal for free”). Justin Bieber grew up, with his new album Believe, then suffered his first adult breakup, from Selena Gomez, and almost got violent with the paparazzi.

Hollywood meanwhile sputtered during summer blockbuster season, later rallying with films like Peter Jackson’s orc-ified The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. As is now the norm, sequels and films based on pre-existing material or figures (zombies!) reassure theatre patrons they aren’t being asked to take chances on the unfamiliar. This included the brooding Bond flick Skyfall, The Great Gatsby in 3-D, biopics like Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln and the wretched Hitchcock, plus big-screen versions of bestsellers like The Hunger Games, The Life of Pi and the conclusion to the humourless sulkfest Twilight, which split Breaking Dawn in half, reasserting family values even among murderous, abusive bloodsuckers.

With various success, we were served up a Spider-Man revamp, Ridley Scott’s incomprehensible and inhuman Prometheus, a Jeremy Renner-starring Bourne Legacy, the dumb-but-enjoyable Men in Black 3 and the conclusion to Christopher Nolan’s heavy Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, which was a creative and unusual superhero film, even if you thought Bane sounded like Futurama’s Zoidberg.

Rise of the Guardians, Brave and Frankenweenie did their best to spark new franchises. Total Recall was pointlessly remade. George Lucas failed to fly with Red Tails. This seems like a dream now, but, well, Battleship? How did Battleship even happen?

A special nod goes to Joss Whedon, though, who wrote the awesome Avengers and made the smart Cabin in the Woods. James Cameron, meanwhile, spared us an Avatar sequel, deciding he was going to be an asteroid miner.

Fresher-than-film TV we consumed on our iPhones, through record illegal computer downloads and sometimes even sitting in front of large glowing boxes attached to wires! Breaking Bad’s mid-season near-finale stopped at a terrifying toilet realization as Game of Thrones hammered sloppily through the 1,009-page A Clash of Kings. Like Louis C.K., Mad Men’s Donald Draper was almost domesticated, while Boardwalk Empire continued as the best show on TV where you can’t completely like anyone. Walking Dead even turned watchable. And American Idol celebrated 10 years of ruining music through karaoke. Congratulations, jerks!

Netflix releasing Star Trek The Next Generation was somehow almost bigger news than any of this.

Not happy with financially trouncing Hollywood, the video game industry, even in a quiet year such as 2012, hit $67 billion, according to Forbes. For comparison, in 2011, the music industry, all of it, earned $67.6 billion.

The interactive Minecraft dominated, while besides three or so new Halos, the biggest release out there was Mass Effect 3, by Edmonton’s BioWare. No one liked the ending, but Entertainment Weekly gave the series the “best ensemble cast of the decade,” which includes Edmonton’s Mark Meer starring as Cmdr. Shepard.

The world finally discovered Adventure Time, feverishly decorated its virtual crib walls with Pinterest, and a Web 1.0 Facebook we’re all pulling away from paid $1 billion to own us.

On the other hand, Michael Jackson’s name earned $145 million, thanks largely to the Cirque du Soleil Immortal Tour. Among the alive, only U2 topped him with $195 million.

In a world increasingly worshipping zombies and the undead, take a look back at what we’ve discussed today. From Tupac’s shimmering ghost to the prospect of new Star Wars films on the horizon, from the Beatles to Big Bird, it’s not so much a matter of everything old being new again, but more that nothing we get our hooks into will ever die.

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